Setting up your Cappuccino development environment

Posted on 08 September 2009 by Johannes Fahrenkrug. Tags: Cappuccino Tutorials Cocoa
I have recently fallen in love with Cappuccino. It's a framework for creating rich internet applications (read: applications that run in the browser but that feel like a desktop application). The crazy thing is that it's not just some other framework, but it actually re-creates the beautiful Cocoa frameworks in JavaScript. When I first heard this I thought it was crazy. I still do, but now I also think it's unbelievably cool because it actually works. Bringing the Cocoa frameworks to the browser is kind of like building a car out of matches and it actually drives. And looks good. And has airbags and a CD player. Awesome. OK, enough of that. How do you get started? Well, you could download the starter package but as a professional developer you probably want to correctly set up your development environment and be on the bleeding edge. That's why this tutorial assumes a few things: you have a Unix-based system, git, and Ruby with RubyGems and Rake installed. The following instructions are based on the official instructions and don't aim to replace them, but possibly make them a little easier to follow. Here we go:
  1. Get the source: 
    git clone git://github.com/280north/cappuccino.git
  2. Make a directory for the built products, for example I did: 
    mkdir /Users/johannes/Code/capp_build
  3. Add $CAPP_BUILD to your .profile (or whatever you use) I did: 
    export CAPP_BUILD=/Users/johannes/Code/capp_build
  4. Source it: 
    source ~/.profile
  5. Build and install cappuccino: 
    cd cappuccino && sudo rake install
  6. That's it!
To update to the latest version, you can later just change into the cappuccino directory and run 
git pull
and then 
sudo rake clobber-all install
And if you use TextMate, you'll want to install the TextMate Objective-J bundle like so (in the cappuccino directory): 
open ./Build/Cappuccino/Tools/Editors/TextMate/JavaScript\ Objective-J.tmbundle
One more optional thing you should do is set up your name in capp (the tool you'll use to generate new applications): 
capp config user.name "Your Name"
You can also set up additional values. So now you're all set to start your first Cappuccino project.

Comments

Johannes Fahrenkrug said...

Thanks, ncho!
[cheesy]I had as much fun writing them as you had reading them[/cheesy] ;-)

September 12, 2009 10:18 AM

ncho said...

Johannes -- thanks for these Cappucinno tutorials. This is great! Also, good to see someone pushing the Radiant envelope -- excellent CMS.

September 11, 2009 06:41 PM

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